The Sega Saturn has been out of retail channels for about ten years now, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of dedicated individuals from creating their own software and games for the vintage machine.  The Rockin-B is not only one of my long-time online contacts from my days on Sega Xtreme, but he is also one of the leading Saturn devs and the organizer of  C4, the annual Sega Saturn Coding Contest.

Instead of simply sharing the results of this year’s contest, I wanted discuss his thoughts on the Saturn Homebrew scene in addition to some technical tidbits about the Saturn itself.  What follows is the inteview he was kind enough to participate in…

Racket: First of all, since you just recently completed judging the newest crop of Saturn homebrew projects, would you mind giving us a run-down of the five finalists in the contest and what you personally like about each from both a gamer perspective and also a developer’s perspective?

Rockin-B: Sure — are some comments on the contestants and their strengths (see the results page for videos and downloads):

VBT   –   Gaganoid, SEGA Blur Being one of the most experienced Saturn developers, VBT has specialized in porting emulators and addicting homebrew games to SEGA Saturn. He utilizes the Sega Basic Library (SBL) to perform low-level hardware access, which gives him total control of the optimization of his software.  He is known to create very professional-looking games with excellent gameplay. Special care is taken to choose only games that are worth porting. Paired with his unique SBL skills, the success is guaranteed.
Amon   –   Destiny’s Kingdom In 2005, Amon debuted in Saturn development by entereing the Saturn coding contest. Out of the box, he got second with a very addicting game called Bubble Invasion. This year, he participated with the RPG style battle demo Destiny’s Kingdom. At the moment he works on homebrew hardware access, to get rid of SEGA libraries.  Amon’s first entry had a very high fun-factor and with his second entry he expressed his ambitions to move on to more complex things. He’s on the way to become a Saturn professional and has got much potential, it’s worth to stay tuned for things to come.
Piratero   –   Yaul Demo With Yaul (Yet Another Useless Library), he presents the results of his work to create a homebrew Saturn library. His long-term objective is to avoid the use of SEGA libraries. With his entry to the Saturn coding contest, he prooves that the library can be used to create homebrew games.  Piratero manages to impress people with graphical special effects. Creating a homebrew library involves a lot of work before non-devvers can take profit of it by playing games created with it.
Madroms   –   Dezaemon 2 Save Game Manager In the scene Madroms is well known for his Saturn videos on youtube and databases for games, demos, Game Basic- and Dezamon 2 games. With his entry D2SGM he deputed in Saturn dev and C programming as well, very impressive. Madroms stands for extremely comprehensive collections, utilizing screenshots, music and further info and media to present things to the gamer. His entry provides a lot of content to the gamer. Thanks to his work, even people not involved in Saturn or Dezaemon 2 can have a peek at these things.
Arnold   –   Police Officer Smith A very enthusiastic and hard working Saturn fan, with special skills in 3d modeling, music composition and image manipulation. He’s strong at everything related with creativity. He contributed graphics and artwork to the Tic Tac Toe game and the C4-2006 CD as well as the C4-2007 CD.  Arnold is able to create rendered 3D graphics as professional looking as CG renders used in commercial Saturn games. He can equip homebrew games with media of a quality previously unseen in homebrew games.

Racket:  I noticed you left yourself out of that list, but I do want to personally thank you for your contributions to the scene as well.  :)    As you know, I’m also a big Sega Saturn fan, but I’d love to hear your take on what drew you to the Saturn and what keeps you devoted to the machine?

Rockin-B: So far, the Japanese SEGA Saturn I secretly bought for myself in early 1995 is the most expensive videogame console that I’ve ever acquired. Apart from its monetary value, I admired it for its design and its beautiful graphics. I did enjoy it a lot back in the day, but then I suddenly forgot about it.  It wasn’t until I visited an electronic market some years later that I sort of woke up, seeing a Saturn offered for a cheap price.  Unfortunately, the console war between Sega Saturn and Playstation had already been fought out and I missed it! This can be considered one of the main reasons why I express my Saturn devotion in doing homebrew Saturn development.

In some ways, I’m still fighting at the front lines of the console war, fighting to unveil the hidden treasures that are still buried under the surface of the Saturn. The goal to create homebrew Saturn stuff that can compete with commercial Saturn games, maybe even PS1 games, kept always being the same. Of course, I was in doubt if it could ever be reached. After all, how should a few amateur programmers be able to outperform a team of professionals that once needed a year or so to create games like Sega Rally?

However as time passes, I worry less about those doubts. Though the Saturn hardware stays the same, we can take advantage from many of technical developments that were not available to the devvers of commercial Saturn games.  They were required to have a dozen of computers, half Windows and half Macintosh-based, plus expensive CD emulator, CD writer and a Saturn development system. We just need a standard, low cost PC. The C compiler that we use is far more advanced than what they had to stick with. New sophisticated algorithms and software has been developed in the last 10 years, we can easily benefit from that by just picking it up and porting it to Saturn.

Some examples: The compression we use in Police Officer Smith is an order of magnitude faster than what is used in the SEGA tools. The buffer memory allocator used in a couple of my projects is way more sophisticated than the one in the SEGA tools. The script language that Police Officer Smith is written in allows for much shorter development times, compared to using C or assembler.

Racket: Homebrew and emulation projects for consoles and handhelds are quickly becoming commonplace.  What do you think drives you and your peers to keep developing for the Saturn as opposed to a machine like the Dreamcast or XBox?

Rockin-B: From what I can tell, homebrew communities of today’s size were given birth by the Dreamcast homebrew scene, which was very fast growing from Y2K on and remained vital for quite a long time. That actually inspired me to do my first steps in homebrew development – on the Dreamcast VMU! In the beginning, I gave quite some consoles a visit, including SEGA Saturn, SEGA Dreamcast and later GP32.

Why I haven’t concentrated on other consoles? Well, on Saturn, you and your work don’t get lost in the mass. We don’t reinvent the wheel ten times, but only two times, if you know what I mean. On Saturn, there’s a place for everyone and every favour.

The Saturn is stuffed with lot’s of different CPUs, RAMs and GPUs, it’s architecture is distributed, manifold, always interesting and a challenge to develop for. If you feel overwhelmed by the mass of knowledge one can have about the inner functions of the Saturn, you always find a small place to hide and rule. The SCU DSP for example, its documentation fit’s on two pages and you don’t need anything Saturn dev related but two command line tools plus a text editor. Easy to learn and hard to master. Though in the past the first term didn’t count for the Saturn as a whole, but the Saturn keeps getting easier to develop for, year by year.

Racket: Obviously, the Dreamcast is much more powerful than the Saturn as a whole, but are there any technical advantages that the Saturn has over the Dreamcast?

Rockin-B: Being designed as a distributed system consisting of independent pieces of hardware, the Saturn has the advantage of employing high quality MPEG movie playback, without affecting the performance. With the external VCD cartridge, the Saturn is best prepared to run games like Space Channel 5, were polygon-characters are dancing in front of a pre-rendered video scene.

The Saturn is also better suited for hardware add-ons than the Dreamcast. For example the 32X used a cartridge port and the video out signal to be plugged with the Genesis. On top of that, the Saturn additionally offers a direct high speed link to the video buffer via the MPEG cartridge port. A skilled homebrew hardware devver could make a hardware extension that turns the Saturn into a beast.

Racket: Has there been any devvers that have explored the add-on capabilities at all?

Rockin-B: Though the add-on capabilities of the Saturn haven’t yet been used for means of hardware acceleration, but they were used for homebrew created peripherals. For the cartridge port, there exist about three homebrew solutions to connect the Saturn to the PC. Two of them feature custom created PCBs that plug into the cartridge port and offer a USB connector. The other one is the USB DataLink device, which plugs into Gameshark and Action Replay carts. This way, existing tools and Saturn homebrew that uses these type of cart can be easily made compatible with the USB DataLink.   The controler port was used for homebrew joypad adapters, such that the PSX analog pad can be used as a 3D analog pad on Saturn.

An extension port that I forgot to mention previously is the internal 20/21 pin port to the CD board. There exists an experimental homebrew modchip which plugs between the CD board and the main board of the Saturn. This is a very interesting field of research. It is to expect that in the next few years, CD-Rs will become rare. Also, the CD drive is one of the first things that gets worn out, having to be replaced.  Wouldn’t it be cool if the Saturn would read ISO-images from SD-carts, instead of CD-Rs? Loading times could be improved both for homebrew and commercial games. Such a thing would have a lot of benefits.

Racket:  Wow — that’s crazy  CD-Rs will probably remain for quite a while IMO (longer than floppy drives), but the idea of an SD card booting ISOs is quite compelling!  I’ve also heard that certain commercial Saturn developers used some of the different processors for functions that they weren’t intended.  (For example: using the sound chip from graphics processing).   Have you or any of your peers played around with any of those ideas?

Rockin-B: Even a lot of non-devers have played around with that idea. While it’s quite common to use the slave CPU, there isn’t much beyond that.  The SH1 processor on the CD board can unfortunately not be programmed, as it’s code is located in an internal flash rom that can’t be overwritten. The motorola 68k sound cpu is not suited for executing genesis code directly, like it has been discussed for genesis emulation on Saturn. But there exists a debugger for the 68k and possibly some example code, that’s it.

A few people have written code for the SCU DSP, but none has been released or used in homebrew. Stuff like floating point operations, geometry transformations and voxel rendering acceleration has been created. A big problem here might be some difficulties in invoking the DSP from the main CPU. Once started, special treatment is needed to prevent the DSP to enter a deadloop.

An example of using a feature for something it wasn’t intended for:  The VDP1 sprite display processor can apply gouraud shading to RGB format textures. However, the gouraud shading feature can be used on paletted sprites as well, interpolating palette indices instead of RGB color values. The CHROME demo that comes with the SGL uses a gradient palette, red gouraud shading on paletted textures and a light source. This way, depending on the angle between the viewpoint, the 3d object and the light source, a bump effect is applied to the surface of the object. Very impressive!

Racket: What is typically the biggest limitation or bottleneck with the Saturn’s hardware when it comes to homebrew development?

Rockin-B: Although the Saturn has a lot of RAM, especially when using the external 4MB RAM cart, it suffers from it being cut into small pieces and scattered all over the system. Applications like emulators need to have a certain amount of continuous RAM available to place a ROM file in it. Of what use is a 1MB external RAM cart, when it is divided into two different chunks of 512kB each? Also, it must have been for cost reasons that SEGA split the main work RAM into two halves of 1MB, one being fast and the other one being slow. It would have meant a great performance impact if it were a single chuck of fast 2MB RAM.

I expect the fill rate of the VDP1 sprite display processor to be the main bottleneck when it comes to compete with the Playstation. However, there are software techniques available to compensate that, which can take advantage of both, the VDP2 scroll screen display processor, as well as a hypothetical external hardware accelerator. These techniques haven’t been applied yet.

The third thing to mention is not a bottleneck by definition, but a nice little thing that could have been a real afterburner instead of being practically unused. I’m speaking about the SCU DSP, which can be used for fast coordinate transformations and lightning computations. It only lacks instruction RAM, clock speed and division instructions. Because of that, it’s so difficult to find the right application for this coprocessor.

Racket:  Have you seen any growth in the Saturn homebrew scene over the years?

Rockin-B: One cannot expect a growth in a community that is by nature dying year by year, since the sale of the console was stopped. We have watched the great Dreamcast homebrew community to rise and fall. I would have never expected this to happen, but it seems like the Saturn scene will outperform the Dreamcast scene in terms of releases, sometime soon. We just have more stamina

The Saturn homebrew scene at least is staying at a constant level, if not even growing a little bit from time to time. It requires significant effort to reach just that. The annual C4 Saturn Coding Contest inspired fresh new people to join the Saturn dev community. Thanks to that, we could compensate for those who left the scene. Also, it did inspire some people who paused their work to give a comeback on Saturndev.

Racket:   Well, hopefully we can help bring some more exposure to your efforts!  Have there been any techniques or accomplishments that you see has a landmark in Saturn homebrew?  If so, what projects have utilized them?

Rockin-B: Quite characteristic and unique to the Saturn is a library of mutliplayer games, suited to be played by up to 12 players at once. Noteworthy is the top-down viewed tank battle game Charette a bestiaux (http://vieille.merde.free.fr/charette.html). Some other examples are addicting variations of games like slime-volleyball, pong, snake or karate.

A great landmark most certainly is the use of hardware acceleration for the SMS Plus port of VBT. He uses both graphic processors to establish full speed emulation on Saturn. If that would be used in the SNES emulator…whooo I have to stop thinking because excitement is wandering through my veins.

As for 3D, there are a couple of sophisticated developments that haven’t yet shown their full potential. There exists a real-time texture mapping library that adds features to the Saturn sprite display processor, which can be used for environment reflections on cars, for example. Another thing is a tool-chain that for the first time enables us to bring huge textured 3D scenery to SEGA Saturn rather easily. It is used for the 3D racing game project and the 3D flying demo I entered to the Saturn contest 2006.  I expect that the to-be-released Lua player for SEGA Saturn will mark a turning point

Racket:   What homebrew project do you most look forward to seeing on the Saturn?

Rockin-B: I’d love to see Aleph One ported to Sega Saturn, but who knows if that’ll ever happen.  It might sound strange, but I most look forward to the release of Police Officer Smith. Arnold and I have been working on it since 2006 and we will take care that when it’s released.  It will shine bright above anything else released for Saturn so far.

Racket:   Obviously, ambitious projects are going to take longer that one year to develop — especially if you have a day job / life.  Are there any long-term Saturn homebrew projects out there?

Rockin-B: Yes, there are. The SMS Plus port by VBT has gone through a couple of significant updates over the last years. Police Officer Smith can be considered a long term project, too, taking possibly two to four years in total to be finished. Piratero, Zaksund and I are each working on various programming libraries since quite a long time. Personally, I’m not a guy for long-term projects. I like it quick — to work very intensively on a topic for a limited amount of time. However, a couple of my projects are being updated even years after their first release, turning them into long-term projects, too.

Racket:  Thanks so much, Rockin-B!  I learned a lot from this discussion and I hope everyone that reads it gets a little something from it as well.

Additional Saturn Homebrew Links

• The C4 Homebrew Contest Downloads
• Videos of all Homebrew Entries

Even though its younger sibling, the Sega Dreamcast, may get all the fame when it comes to a great homebrew community, the Sega Saturn still has a loyal following of developers.

The yearly Saturn Coding Contest hosted by Rockin’-B has concluded for 2006 and the results are quite impressive.

The winners are:

• Bounty Getters (proof of concept) by Zaksund
• Super Mario Clone ported by VBT
• Charette A Bestiaux (multiplayer tank battle game) by Vreuzon

You can download the SEGA Saturn CD images, view detailed ranking and read complete judge comments at the contest results page. Don’t miss playing the entries yourself, either on a real SEGA Saturn (swap-trick or modchip) or on an emulator like SSF, yabause and the like.

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Sega, Saturn

First of all, an ambitious homebrew effort has been started to revive Streets of Rage with added visuals, moves, and feautures. Of course, a Dreamcast port is anticipated, but some of the community is devoted to keeping it strictly PC. For more information check out Sega 16’s Review and join the racketboy Forum discussion.

Also, as you may have noticed on today’s Virtual Console post, the original Streets of Rage will be coming to the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console. The US has had a long wait for Streets of Rage since Sega has pulled it from all of their compilation discs in the US due to the Teen rating.

And finally, Sega is also eying the strong possibility of bringing Streets of Rage to the XBox Live Arcade. I am actually more interested in seeing it on XBLA since the games on the 360 usually get better treatment in terms of visuals, audio, and multiplayer features.

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Sega, Fighters

Anyway, the AtariAge community has put together a homebrew compilation of Pac-Man games and created a spiffy little package that is playable on the Atari 7800.

This Pac-Man compilation includes:

• Pac-Man
• Puck Man
• Hangly Man
• Ultra Pac-Man
• Random Mazes
• Ms. Pac-Man
• Ms. Pac-Attack
• Ms. Random Mazes

You can find out more about the games themselves, see screenshots, and place an order on The 7800 Pac-Man Collection page. You can also read and/or join in on the discussion on the official forum thread.

(You can’t help but wonder if Namco will be beating down their door after this, but you have to hand it to the crew for the all the effort.)

It turns out that AtariAge also sells a number of other homebrew game cartridges for pretty much every Atari system. The one that caught my eye was “This Planet Sucks” for the 2600. The game is inspired by the Taito classic, Lunar Rescue.

I guess selling homebrew games isn’t new since stores like the The GOAT Store have been selling homebrew games for a while now. But I guess somehow it seems a bit more interesting to see new games with labeled cartridges and manuals being sold for old cartridge-based systems like the early Atari consoles.

It is encouraging to see that homebrew games for older consoles are selling since it helps support retro developers in addition to proving that retro gaming is still alive and well.

I have known about the GP2X (and its predecessor, the GP32) and its emulation/media capabilities for quite some time, but have never had the opportunity to actually use one until now.

I’m still waiting for my Sandisk 2GB SD card to come in the mail, so for now I am limited to using the small amount (about 32MB) of internal storage for my gaming needs. Until my extra storage arrives, I will share my thoughts on the device itself and my experiences so far with getting software up and running on it.

Form Factor & Design
When I first picked the GP2X up after pulling it from the box, I was rather surprised how light it was. It doesn’t have much weight at all until you put the two AA batteries in the back.

The size is just about right for adequate comfort, but isn’t too terribly thin. The battery area in the back gives it a little bulk and prevents it from being easy to store in your pocket. Keep in mind, a bit of thickness is nice for a handheld for long gaming sessions. Your hands will cramp up much quicker on a device that is especially thin.

If you like the glossy black look of the PSP, you should feel right at home with the GP2X. It isn’t quite as “sleek” as the PSP, but I actually like the style of the GP2X better as it is more practical and comfortable. In my opinion the PSPs design is geared more towards looking nice and impressing your friends.

As with the PSP (and probably the dark-colored DS Lites), the GP2X is prone to fingerprinting. It is a challenge to keep the thing looking flawless in the light as fingerprints show up on the glossy finish extremely easy. It’s not as noticeable on my white DS Lite.

My main complaint about the design of the unit’s body isn’t anything deal-breaking, but rather are slight annoyances and something that can be taken as a “wishlist” for the “GP3X”. The handheld has little rubber stoppers for all input and output ports on the machine like the headphone jack, USB port, and such. This annoys me for a few reasons…

• They take away from the sleek look of the handheld
• The don’t usually stay in place completely and instead hang out a bit
• They sometimes keep my USB cable from going in all the way
• I use my USB cable and headphones frequently, so it slows me down

I could just rip them all off, but then everything still isn’t flush down the edges of the system and I also feel guilty for “damaging” such a beautiful piece of machinery. I just can’t win.

The Screen
Ok, back to praising the GP2X… The screen is simply stunning. The default brightness seems on par with my DS Lite, but I have yet to do a side-by-side comparison. Colors are all brilliant and I look forward to playing my old Genesis games on it just to see how great they look on the handheld.

As great as the two screens are on the DS Lite, each individual screen is rather small by today’s standards. I am occasionally jealous of the PSP and how good some old-school games look on it. At the same time, I haven’t been a big fan of the PSP’s “widescreen” layout (just like the fact that I would rather not buy a widescreen TV) since emulators and most ports of older games are all stretched out.

The GP2X, on the other hand, gets everything right with its screen. Basically every aspect I like about the screens of both the DS Lite and the PSP is incorporated into the GP2X, leaving me with a screen I don’t really have any complaints about. (A dimming dial would be nice, I guess)

The Controls
The GP2X has what I consider to be the most comfortable controls of all the handhelds I have used (other than stylus-only games on the DS). New newest version of the D-pad (which I’m not sure if it is actually analog or just looks like one) is quite comfortable and moves around well. The four buttons on the right side of the console are some of my favorite among those handheld lineup as well. While the DS Lite buttons look nice, they are actually quite uncomfortable and stiff. The GP2X seems more like the original Gameboy Advance buttons that I like. I haven’t had to use the trigger buttons much yet, but they seem like they aren’t easily reachable most of the time. While I like it better than the ones on the GBA SP, they don’t seem quite as comfortable as the original GBA.

My only complaints button-wise is the volume buttons. It has a up and down volume button below the D-pad that reminds me of the volume controls on my Dell laptop at work. I prefer the volume dial on my GBA. Not only is the dial more intuitive and responsive, but I like having it on the side of the unit instead of on the face of the unit.

The Speakers
I do think that Gamepark Holdings cheaped out on the speaker capabilities. They probably wanted to make sure the most important things like CPU speed and the screen were top notch and cut corners on the speakers. This isn’t a huge deal to me personally since I use my headphones for portable gaming most of the time, but some people may be disappointed.

Also, maybe its just my imagination, but the volume control doesn’t seem to make much of a difference when using the speakers. I can tell a difference when wearing headphones, but I can’t seem to turn the volume all the way down (mute) and it takes me numerous presses of the “up” button to hear it get much louder. (And it doesn’t get very loud)

Overall, you will probably notice the speaker quality as the most common disappointment listed in reviews of the system, but luckily it isn’t a huge issue to me.

The Software
Again, I haven’t been able to test everything just yet as I need more storage before I go testing the video and music capabilities, but I’ve heard good things.

Overall, the interface is pleasing and works fairly well. Navigating to your installed emulators and games isn’t friendly enough for non-techie people since its much like navigating through a small version of Windows Explorer. I’ve seen some software add-ons that let you customize the interface and make it a little easier to move around and launch your favorite games and apps.

Installing new software is pretty easy for the most part. Most games and emulators just require you to copy a folder over to your SD card or internal memory and then run the app. I got my Genesis emulator and a few homebrew games running in no time.

However, I tried two different NES emulators numerous times and never got them to work. One kept telling me it “could not access the folder” which I could not figure out. I tried a bunch of different things and verified that my program and ROMs folder was in the right place (at least I’m pretty sure) and wasn’t write-protected and it still won’t run.

I still have to get used to a few things, but my experience has been pretty nice. I look forward to see what the homebrew community has in store as things are still a bit rough, but the scene really has a lot of promise.

The Community
Much like the Sega Dreamcast, the GP2X has a loyal following and has very good software support since no modifications are necessary to run homebrew software. However, since the Dreamcast is much cheaper now on the aftermarket, the cost of entry is much lower and more people are using the software.

Having this low cost of entry is both good and bad for the community. The negative aspect is that you have slightly fewer homebrew users which leads to less motivation for developers. On the other hand, the higher price keeps the kiddies and newbies out which results in less bickering and more appreciation for the hard work that the community has put in.

Overall
I can’t help but recommend the GP2X to anyone that has some spare cash and wants a portable emulation system. As opposed to the PSP and DS that either need expensive add-ons or constant hacks to get homebrew to run, the GP2X is an affordable solution that is easy to get stuff up and running on.

While I found some minor annoyances, Gamepark Holdings should be proud of this great handheld. I can honestly say that my DS Lite is feeling quite neglected and the GP2X will definately be getting a good share of playtime on the go and at my office (during lunch break, of course).

I plan on following up on this with more in-depth reviews and emulation guides in addition to more of my own pictures in the near future.

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Portable Gaming, Emulation

This time around I will be taking a look at Excessively Free Games, a site that is devoted to online Flash-based games. As many of my readers are aware, there are quite a few sites like this (I guess the first few made some money and others are trying to get in on the action). But don’t tune me out just yet. I intend to turn this review into a good business lesson for both the people at Excessively Free Games and anybody else that wants to start up one of these sites.

Anyway, When I first was invited to review the site, I was hoping to find something new and different. While I was pleased to see an interesting section for emulated NES games, I was disappointed that all the other content seemed pretty generic and uninviting.

Not only is most of the site filled with games that can be found on just about any other Flash games site, but everything just seems to be thrown up with hopes that visitors will just wander around and play everything instead of leading us to something worthwhile.

Instead of simply criticizing the site and blowing it off, I thought I would share some thoughts from my business experience that can be applied to this site or any others in order to turn it into a successful venture…

Don’t Try To Do It All. The Newsgrounds and a few others has already taken the place of the one-stop-shop for Flash games, and unless you have some tremendous resources, you aren’t going to beat them. Not only do these big sites have a MUCH better selection of games, they have developers submitting their freshest work on a constant basis in addition to a killer site design and interface.

Choose a Strong Niche. In order to set yourself apart, you need to focus on a single niche that a certain group of gamers is passionate about. Maybe that niche will be emulated NES and SNES games (although good luck staying under Nintendo’s radar with that one) or maybe just shootemup games like Alien Hominid or Ikaruga. If you specialize in one category or genre, you will be more likely to attract fans of that niche and not push them away with all the other clutter. Check out the article “The Long Tail” and the book that expands on the topic for more analysis of the topic of niches.

Stay Relavant. On a similar note, one thing I noticed about Excessively Free Games and many other Flash game sites is they have categories like “Retro” or Arcade”, but include games that aren’t retro or arcade. As somebody that enjoys retro arcade games, I don’t like to click on a category and find non-relevant content. Relevancy is something that is often overlooked, but is actually very important to users.

Create a Compelling Interface. To keep users coming back, you need to create an interface that is unique and/or simple. Don’t just throw everything up and hope for the best and make us click more than we have to. Just this past weekend a project known as Wiicade was recently announced. Wiicade intends to be a flash game site optimized for the Nintendo Wii’s Opera web browser. Because it may be the only Flash game site gears towards Wii users, it will probably get a lot of traffic (It’s already been featured on Digg and Joystiq) and repeat users. Bottom line is that you have to be different. Create a reason that gamers should choose you instead of the other guys. If you would like to learn more about these concepts, I suggest reading two other books: Purple Cow and Blue Ocean Strategy.

Use Various Delivery Methods. With technology that is now commonplace in the web community, it is easy to get visitors to return to your site and find new games. You could almost treat you game library like a blog — adding a new game every few days or once a week. Adding an RSS feed or email updates option would allow visitors to be notified when a new game is available. You could also allow comments to be added to games so you could get feedback to your users. This is all common knowledge in the Web 2.0/Blogging communities, but I haven’t seen any Flash game sites utilizing these features.

Create a Memorable Brand While there have been numerous books written on the topic of building brands, I’ll keep this point to a couple of ideas relevant to a small gaming site. First of all, don’t use a generic name. Try to develop a creative name and spend a little cash to hire a college-age, but talented graphic designer to develop a logo and theme. Also, don’t rely on trademark characters such as Mario, Link, or Sonic to represent your site and take up your header. Every amateur gaming site takes this approach. Again, try to be different. While this article at ProBlogger is geared towards blogs, many of the concepts can be applied to other kinds of sites.

Use Advertising Intelligently. Obviously, your site needs to make money. As fun as it is to have a gaming site, I realize that we all have bills to pay. However, if you don’t use your advertising tactfully, you will quickly give the impression that your site is cheap. Instead of slapping a bunch of Adsense ads on the page to surround each game, put just a couple in a subtle, yet effective spots (learn how to position them) and mix them in with some attractive affiliate links to your favorite gaming products or stores. You may also want to work out a deal with smaller gaming businesses to work out a small advertising deal. For more ideas on monetizing your site without depending on Adsense, check out this article at ProPlogger.

Overall, Excessively Free Games is good enough to burn through some extra time if you are bored, but so are a lot of other sites. Other nitpick include having to click though an extra page to open a popup window for the game and certain pages displaying wrong in Firefox (see example)

I do invite you to take a look at the site and let me know if there are some games that you especially liked and/or if you have additional ideas on how to make a more compelling Flash games site.

This post is sponsored by Excessively Free Games and ReviewMe.com